So, it’s March already, which is almost one-sixth of the way through the year, 16%–give or take, and I’m sitting around moping because I don’t feel like I’m making any progress on any of my projects. It’s too cold and I’m too poor to do the fun woodworking projects I want to do. The writing project I started back in October is still on hold, mainly because I keep writing myself in circles. I don’t know where to go from here, my other four or five writing projects are also on hold because I wanted to do this other one first. Even my projects at work are taking significantly longer than I feel they should–I’m figuratively spinning my wheels on the winter ice that’s fallen on my Roadway to Success™.

In Getting Things Done, David Allen talks about a review system. Every few months, weeks, days, you’re suppose to look at all your open projects and figure out where they are. Are you still doing them? What’s the next action item? How is it coming along. This can be super depressing when nearly all of your projects are in a “waiting” stage, waiting on warm weather, waiting on money, waiting on inspiration, waiting for someone to do the thing they said they would do.

I just want to see progress and when there is no progress to see, it can be frustrating. Maybe the reason I don’t see progress is because I’m looking in the wrong spot.

If I’m looking at what I want to still accomplish, I’m looking forward, I’m not going to see behind me. I’m not seeing the stuff I’ve already done.

That’s the second half of the review process. That’s something I think we forget about, at least, I know I forget about it.

It’s only day 59 of 2015, but it’s actually been a busy year, if I stop to think about it. I did just finish building a small bookshelf for my dining room. The water filter and new faucet in my kitchen have truly improved my standard of living. I don’t have any good way to track my word count right now, but I spent a fair amount of time writing this year, even if it feels I don’t have anything to show for it. I don’t want to count my work projects, but I did have that business trip… and there was that event I ran camera for. Somehow in the past eight weeks I’ve managed to watch 17 movies and finish reading 12 books. When did I find time for that?

“People overestimate what they can do in a day and underestimate what they can do in a year.” – Bill Gates

The point is, as important as it is to look forward, it’s also good to look back. Looking back we can remember the things we have done, learn from our mistakes, and make sure we’re still headed on the path we want to be on.

There’s fulfillment that comes from looking back on your accomplishments, but you only get it if you take time to reminisce. A few weeks back a friend and I were discussing the balance between doing awesome things and telling everyone about the awesome things you are doing. If you spend too much time doing one of those you won’t have time for the other.

I don’t know if it’s really important to try to balance these things, I think it’s a futile battle for most of us. The reason we talk about balance is because we regret spending too much time on this thing or that, and then we feel guilty about it. Which is really just crazy. We need to accept that we will spend time on the things we think are important. When there are other important things we need to pay attention to, then we decide what takes precedence. Rather than give everything a set percent all the time, why can’t we give some things 100% some of the time?

Truthfully, we can. We’re adults. (Most of us.) Being an adult just means that we’re expected to take responsibility for our actions, own up, do what we think is right, and live with the consequences. Welcome to life.

Take some time to review the first two months of your year. There’s probably a few things you did that you forgot about. And if there’s things you planned to get to, but didn’t, well, you still got ten more months to go, and this review can help give you the motivation to make it happen.

In January of 2014 I noticed my reading list had 52 books on it so I decided I was going to read a book a week for the year. 52 weeks later I am happy to say that I read 55 books this year, though I still have a few that need to be finished, and my reading list is now inexplicably over 87 books long.

I would be amiss if I did not look back on this extremely literary year and share some of my thoughts with other readers, what good is a story if you are unable to share it?

I have been a fan of Daniel Suarez since he captured my imagination with Daemon a few years back. The technology within Daemon blew me away. The technology in Influx is significantly more fantastic and futuristic.

What really drew me into Daemon is how realistic and plausible the tech was. Suarez takes a piece of technology or a concept and takes it to the logical conclusion. Even with Kill Decision, the concept was real enough to be slightly terrifying. Influx treads deeper into fiction than his previous books and part of me rebelled at the idea of suspending more disbelief.

Altogether, I loved the book. It’s clear that Suarez loves technology and it’s easy for me to relate to the characters and get excited about the things they get excited about. In many ways I really consider this a “guy” book because in the same way that a “guy movie” is full of action and explosions Suarez punches the action to full throttle and doesn’t skimp on any of the important details.

I devoured the book within a few days of its release in February. Each of Daniel Suarez books is read on Audible by Jeff Gurner, one of my favorite readers and I ended up purchasing both the kindle and audible versions of the book. This was my first chance to use the Whisper Sync feature which seamlessly synced the audio and kindle versions of the book. It worked great. I put down my kindle to head to work and could keep listening from where I left off on my short commute. I was quite impressed. Continue reading →

Breaking Bad habits and creating good habits is a challenge. Habits by definition are tendencies, unconscious actions, things you do without thinking about it. Which is great if it’s good like washing hands or saying thank you and not so good if they are bad.

Not all resolutions need to be habits but both habits and life style changes require conscious effort to change. Here are some tips and tricks for creating and following through with your new New Years Resolutions.

1. Make resolutions active.

“Watch less Netflix” and “play less video games” are bad resolutions because they are poorly worded. Rather than try to do less of something, a resolution should actively try to do more of a thing.

The reason we sit down and watch hours of TV is because we can. Sure there’s other things we could or maybe even “should” be doing, but we either don’t “need” to or we don’t want to. A resolution like “read more books” is better than “watch less TV” because it gives you an alternative to watching TV. Next time you sit down and reach for the remote you have a mental trigger with something else you could do on the couch.

It’s easier to NOT do something if you have another thing that you can be doing instead.

2. Make resolutions specific.

“Exercise more” is a bad resolution. Not because exercise is bad, but because it doesn’t mean anything. What is more? More than what, last year? Then I only need to exercise once! What constitutes exercise?

“Run three times a week” is a better resolution because it gives you a specific goal you need to try to meet. Something to track and a standard to hold yourself against.

3. Track your progress.

“Eat four salads a week” is a great resolution, but how will you know if you’re keeping it? Tracking past events my memory is not a viable long term solution. We forget stuff all the time, how often do we forget what we ate for breakfast?

Once you have a specific and active resolution, you need to make sure you are on track. Find a calendar, start a journal, it doesn’t need to be fancy, it just needs to be easy. Tracking your progress is important because it reminds you about your goal and provides emotional support when you are feeling tired. Yes, it sounds a bit silly, but when you can look back at a few weeks worth of accomplishment you feel really good about what you can do.

If this journal or calendar is in an easy to see location it’s also a continual reminder about the thing you have resolved to do.

4. Don’t give up when you slip

Life is hectic. Life is crazy. Life is inconsistent. Don’t let a single failure or slip ruin your resolution. You’re better than that. Don’t dwell on it, don’t regret it, just pick up where you left off and keep going. There’s no way anyone is able to be 100% consistent with something for the rest of their lives. Humans just don’t work like that. So just shrug it off and keep going.

I hope these tips and tricks help you become the better person you are trying to be.

I love being on the cutting edge of technology. At least, I use to. I’m not so sure I do anymore.

It’s hard to say if this is the consequence of growing up or the result of technology never quite living up to the perfection it is hyped under.

Today my annoyance is iOS 8, “the biggest iOS release ever.” As Apple touts, it has “exciting new apps with capabilities that were never possible before.”

I can only assume, quite critically, that these capabilities include having the emoticon keyboard pop-up as default instead of the third-party one I installed. I dragged the new keyboard to the top of the preference list, I mean, I’ve had multiple built-in keyboards activated for years without issue. Apple claimed 8.0.2 would fix that issue, but it didn’t.

There doesn’t seem to be any documentation on Apple’s site, but I’ve noticed that several of my apps will occasionally refuse to load and I will stare at a white screen or mostly white screen long enough to forget which app I just tried to open. Granted, I will take the blame for having such short memory retention, and to Apple’s credit, I am inclined to believe this actually is a feature I’ll wonder how I ever did without.

This sentiment is certainly nothing original, progress is measured in new features not in bug fixes.

Which leads me to two articles I ran across this week.

A blog post by Rusty called It Just Works did a fantastic job of summing up the same sentiments that I have.

“Tim Cook keeps telling us that ‘Only Apple’ could do the amazing things it does. I just wish that Apple would slow down their breakneck pace and spend the time required to build stable software that their hardware so desperately needs. The yearly release cycles of OS X, iOS, iPhone & iPad are resulting in too many things seeing the light of day that aren’t finished yet. Perhaps the world wouldn’t let them, perhaps the expectations are now too high, but I’d kill for Snow iOS 8 and Snow Yosemite next year. I’m fairly confident I’m not alone in that feeling.”

Now any major OS release is going to have some problems, that should go without saying. I hesitate to say that this latest update contains more bugs than iOS7, but it does feel that things haven’t gotten any easier for me.

In the article the former Apple managers talk about the high pressure work environment and the long day s and short nights that went along with it. I’m curious how much of this mentality trickles down to the engineers and developers working on the different projects as well.

When the original Macintosh was being created the story is told that the team made t-shirts that said “90 hours a week and loving it!” In general developers and people interested in technology are often portrayed as hard working people who value solving problems over sleep regularly. If this is really how the company is working on the inside, I’m not really surprised that there are such obvious bugs and mistakes. Actually, I’m a little surprised there are not more.

That said, Apple sets their own release schedule. A company built on the principle of “Think Different” has no requirement to release a new phone OS at the same time every year. When your product is being pre-ordered by 4 million people, it’s hard to say if that is more or less incentive to make sure everything works correctly right out of the box. For sure, Apple has a reputation for making good stuff, but if there are 4 million people willing to buy your product no questions asked, maybe good enough is good enough.

More telling, at least to me, is how giddy and excited everyone seems on stage at the recent Apple Events. I’d like to think that everyone going up on stage has been up for 36 hours and took a 15 minute shower in coffee shortly before going on stage.

In light of all of this, it feels a little naive of me to hope that the next version of iOS or even Yosemite will be more polished, but hope springs eternal. Here’s to new technology.

This week I talked about the Apple Watch on This One Podcast ((For what it’s worth This One Podcast isn’t a new show and I’m comfortable making inaccurate or outrageous claims in that setting just to see if I can get a reaction from some of the few people I know who occasionally listen to the show.)) and shortly afterwards was contacted on twitter and told,

You guys are so off-base with the watch, especially on price… – @mknepprath

He provided a link to Gruber’s Apple Watch: Initial Thoughts and Observations blog post, as if this would refute everything we said on the show or at least set us straight. (It didn’t as far as I’m concerned and I’m not entirely sure how we were “off-base” in our discussion, but I thought I would use this opportunity to clarify my position.)

As usual Gruber makes a good and well reasoned argument for his case, something he’s known for in the blogging world. I agree with most of his predictions, but there’s something he doesn’t directly address in his article.

Expectations.

Yes, Gruber mentions several times how the tech industry is going to flip-out when they find out the real watch prices or see the higher than expected sales numbers. I’ve had the same thoughts, but the amount of negative or dismissive talk on the subject is certainly telling.

The Apple Watch announcement was very different than the Apple announcements of late, because it completely defied expectations. “Everyone” expected Apple to take on the smart watch market, go head-to-head with the fitbit, the Moto, Google Glass, all these other wearables, at least I did. Instead, Apple has taken on the entire watch industry. As Gruber said, Apple doesn’t go into a market unless they think they can own it.

This is a complete departure from how most people are viewing Apple these days. Apple is the company that makes really good phones, the company that makes really thin laptops, the company that makes easy to use tablets. Apple is known for making technology accessible, but never at the cost of sacrificing quality. Rumors of the Apple Watch undoubtedly conjured images of a future where wearable tech was affordable for everyone.

For $349 the Apple Watch is an amazing piece of technology. The more time I have to think about it, the more it sounds like the $400 mark is probably the sweat spot for a device like this. Honestly, how can they afford to put that much stuff into something so small and charge so little? The amount of tech Apple is able to cram into this little thing is astounding and really makes me wonder what iPhone 7 is going to look like, now that the engineers at Apple have a chance to play with all this cool new tech and forced to work on an even smaller scale.

Personally, I think the Apple Watch is going to do amazing, but I’m also a little sad because I don’t think it’s for me. I don’t know that I have many friends who will be getting one of these, at least not to begin with.

When going into a big Apple announcement, I’m hoping for Apple to have created something that solves a problem for me. Sometimes I’m even hoping that they have fixed a problem I didn’t even know about yet. The Apple Watch, at least right now, is just really cool tech. There are people who will undoubtedly never know how they lived without one, but at this initial stage it’s a luxury item.

I am very interested to see what approach Apple takes with the watch over the next few years. One of the more interesting points Gruber talks about is the longevity of the Apple Watch. Mobile technology is advancing at an extremely rapid pace right now but watch technology has been pretty well explored over the last few centuries. Watches are not meant to be replaced once a year, top of the line watches are meant to last for years if not forever. The tech industry expects Apple to start coming out with a new Watch every year. Already journalists and bloggers are saying “wait for version 2.0!” Computer circuitry and rechargeable batteries have a life span of three to five years. Knowing Apple’s affinity for non-replaceable batteries, I’m curious to know what their plan is for high end watches.

Why I’m Not Off Base

There’s a tendency, especially with Apple technology, to see people write “this product doesn’t do what I want it to do and so it is doomed to fail and no one should buy it” pieces. This is patently ridiculous because it ignores the fact that everyone has different needs, wants, and desires. My view on the Apple Watch has been consistent from day one, you can even ask Bob Martens about my reaction as we watched the keynote together.

The Apple Watch is an amazing piece of technology, but from the limited stuff we know about it right now, it’s not for me. At least not yet. I’ve said several times that I really wish it was something I could use, I really wish it was something I think I could afford, but it’s not. Not yet. This isn’t a problem with the watch. I can go to any department store and find a hundred different toys, pieces of clothing, or prepackaged food that aren’t for me. I could talk for hours about why a Ralph Lauren sofa isn’t a good fit for my living room, but that doesn’t mean I think they make crappy furniture or that they should be priced like Ikea.

All of my conversations about the Apple Watch have been personally oriented. I also think there is a fair amount of humor in the fact that Apple released the Apple Watch right alongside new phones with larger screens. As Jonas joked during the podcast:

There’s no middle ground anymore. This is basically Apple admitting to being the Sith. They only deal in extremes.

Just because I don’t think the ROI on an Apple Watch is quite there for me, doesn’t mean I won’t change my mind in the future. Part of the issue right now is that details about functionality and features are rather scarce. I would be surprised if future features or updates don’t pique my interest, maybe even before the thing hits store shelves.

A Note On Timing

I don’t think Apple should have announced the Apple Watch right now but I think that they had to. I would have probably waited until the watch was nearly ready to ship and a lot of other stuff was nailed down, the demos in the keynote focused on a lot of eye candy rather than useful features.

Yet there are a number of good reasons to announce the watch now.

It’s pretty obvious that Apple wanted (needed?) to beat the rumors on this one. They had to announce now or something would have leaked. I think they also needed to give people time to digest the information. As a consumer I have half a year to think about this product before it hits the shelves. That gives me plenty of time to trudge through the seven stages of grief and start saving up for one.

I was at an art lecture by William Bukowski and he said something I have heard others say, but something really made it stick with me this time.

“I’ve always said artists are kinda like, there’s something slightly off with artists, generally. Think of the artists you know and think about that. They are compelled to do something, to put themselves out there that normal people don’t want to do, you know? Think of a guy like Robin Williams, his performance, same thing. A normal person doesn’t do it. Maybe a normal person doesn’t paint or dance or sculpt or act, but the people who do feel compelled, we have to do this, it isn’t really a choice.” – William Bukowski, Sept 4, 2014

For the past year or so I’ve been making a conscious effort to spend less time playing video games. (Hang with me here, this is all connected.) It really hasn’t be difficult, I have a lot of other stuff I want to do and I get a lot of enjoyment from these other things, so I really just have to remind myself that I have other stuff to do and I’m good to go.

Yet, I still find myself gravitating toward certain games, activities, if you will. Lately I’ve allowed myself some time with MiniMetro. Conceptually, the game is really more just route optimization and pattern recognition. Arguably, it’s more math and problem solving than a “game” but I find it to be a fun challenge. Similarly, I’ve found myself playing a tower defense game on my iPhone (GeoDefense).

Games like these are challenging but have a very low barrier to entry.

In Getting Things Done by David Allen one of the contexts he encourages you to track is your energy level. If you have a lot of energy you can take on a challenging task. When your energy level is low, you take on a low energy task. This type of optimization allows you to “be productive” even when you don’t “feel productive,” but I think there’s more to it than this.

I have very little artistic talent when it comes to drawing or painting. I’ve never done much of it and it’s not something that calls out to me to pursue. At the same time, I am very compelled to do stuff, to create things, to solve problems. Even when I am tired, my brain wants to play. It wants to be distracted by problems. My brain doesn’t care if it’s trying to get little shapes to their appropriate train stations or preventing geometric objects from reaching their goal. It just wants something to crunch on, even if it doesn’t have the energy to do a higher level task.

Which circles back to sorting screws. There’s something very cathartic about sorting screws. It would not be a terribly exciting or fulfilling occupation, but occasionally it can be quite satisfying. It’s more than just bringing order to something that was chaotic, though that is undoubtedly part of the appeal. No, it’s more about puzzle solving, in some ways it is a puzzle. Monotonously sorting through pieces until you find a piece that looks like another piece.

Which brings me back to Bukowski’s quote. It’s not just artists who are compelled to do stuff. We are all compelled to do stuff, it’s just that we all have different abilities and we all find different ways to fulfill that need within us. You don’t have to argue over ‘what constitutes art’ to realize that everyone is looking for the type of satisfaction (or fulfillment) that artists are able to achieve by painting.

This isn’t necessarily something we’re conscious of, or something we think about in these terms very often.

Granted, we could discuss the cost-benefit or ROI values for alternative activities. I would be willing to entertain the concept that watching movies, reading books, or playing video games are just as valid as making art, woodworking, or gardening, at least in the sense that they are all means of passing the time. There’s certainly something to be said about having something to show for the time you put into the activity, but plants die, sculptures break, and paintings sit in store rooms, unseen.

Please do not think I’m advocating for the validity of people who do nothing but play video games or watch youtube. I certainly have a greater respect for people who create over people who simply enjoy to consume. But people who are creatively compelled do not always understand why other people are not. Similarly, people who are not talented artistically or have not yet discovered or developed their talents may be looking for a means to achieve that same sensation.

Are you compelled to be creative? What activities bring you satisfaction? Do you benefit from time watching TV or do you reluctantly turn it off feeling regretful that you’ve lost another chunk of productive time?